


One Year Later Anthology Part III: Lonesome Valley

by clightlee



Series: SSO Wild West One Year Later Anthology [3]
Category: Star Stable
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 02:08:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17499575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clightlee/pseuds/clightlee
Summary: When New Jorvik Ranger Alonso disappears, it will take an alliance of three powerful women to rescue him... unless he doesn't mean to be rescued at all.





	1. Find Me In The Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> I call this the Call Me Al story because it has Ali, Allison, and Alonso in it.  
> Eden belongs to sso-eden-dawnvalley on tumblr  
> Allison belongs to a-lonely-star-gazer on tumblr  
> Ali belongs to @BookwormSupreme

Allison raised the spyglass to her eye and stared down into the darkness. From her spot high on the mountainside she was confident that nobody- not even if they were looking- would notice the flash of distant candlelight reflecting from its lens. Down in the valley the party was in full swing, and when the gentle night wind shifted just right she could make out the elegant strains of a string quartet. 

 _Still hiding in the shadows. Typical._ Her conscience had developed a mind of its own ever since she donned the badge of a Marshal in the New Jorvik Rangers. Allison- Marshal Nightstar- was still partly in disbelief that she, raised by outlaws, formerly thrown out of the Rangers, a former bandit and n’er-do-well, had been handpicked by the elite peacekeeping force to lead her own squadron of mounted police, but here she was: gun, badge, epaulettes and all.

_So ride down there and invite yourself in. Marshal._

Allison pulled a face at her own inner chiding and crisply collapsed the telescope on the flat of her hand. She was, of course, right; she was a wanted woman no more, and had every right to knock on the door of even the finest homes in New Jorvik. But the news she brought with her, well… so burdened, even a Marshal of the New Jorvik Rangers would take any opportunity to avoid darkening someone’s door.

 

 

_Hiding in the shadows. Again._

Aaliyah Archdotter glided through the veranda of her new home, brows knit, skirts swirling. Her shadow was cast behind her like a train by the long taper in her hand. Inside, the party- a party thrown to welcome the elite of New Jorvik into her home- was simmering along under the auspices of good wine, genteel music, and polite conversation. There’d even been a dance or two, and her face was still warm from the exertion of keeping up with the surprisingly energetic Mr. William Millhill, a local dairyman, in a polka.

 _I came here to live on my own terms. Not skulk. My ambitions have been hidden too long._ Ali located the kitchen doorway, darkened for the night, and sank gratefully into its shadows. She just needed a chance to collect herself and arrange her face into that of an invincible force of nature, someone infinitely wise beyond her twenty-one years. She leaned back, the cool of the wall and the night air soothing her, until she realized: she wasn’t alone.

“Eeeep!” She sprang away, startled by the humanoid form rising to its feet from the very doorway she’d sought. Thankfully, under the light of her taper, the shape soon resolved itself into the shape of a young woman- who didn’t look overly startled.

“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows,” Eden Dawnvlalley sighed, rising to her feet and stiffly fluffing her uncharacteristic skirts. Her parents had insisted that she accompany them to this ridiculous society function, frilly mauve party dress and all. They’d reconciled themselves to the fact that their only daughter was destined to forever ride the range in dusty chaps, but that only gave them ammunition to deploy when fighting Eden on matters of polite society. Tonight, they were welcoming a promising new leading light from Old Jorvik to the town, and it would be appalling if their daughter had skipped out on the festivities to go chase strays.

“I was trying to do the same thing,” Ali laughed, slightly sheepish. “I don’t blame you in the slightest.”

“Not to pry, but isn’t this… your party?” Eden asked, yanking at a stray lock of hair. She’d never liked coiffures.

Ali nodded. “I just need a moment to process all this. You have a lovely town, Miss…?”

“Dawnvalley, but call me Eden,”

“Miss Eden, but trying to remember everyone’s name after a single introduction and making an unforgettable first impression in the interest of business is _exhausting._ ” Ali let out a breath. She hadn’t been able to unburden herself since her pack train had set foot in New Jorvik, but the Dawnvalley girl had a kindly look in her eyes, was dressed approximately the same as Ali, and was somewhere around her own age. Not a potential business partner or rival; maybe they could be friends.

“I can only imagine. I’m more the taciturn cowpoke type myself,” quipped Eden, cracking a small smile.

Ali smiled back. “You’re very well dressed for a-” the thought died on her lips, and Eden held up a hand for silence.

Hoofbeats. Approaching slow, from the back of the property, far from the road. Someone was crashing the party.

“Do we worry?” Ali whispered.

Eden gave a helpless shrug. She felt entirely useless in her flounced skirts and wobbly pumps.

Ali squared her shoulders, gave her jaw a clench, and strode off the veranda to face the interloper. “Who goes there?” she demanded, Old Jorvik accent sounding extra plummy in the clean Western air.

The rider swept off their hat. “New Jorvik Rangers, ma’am. Marshal Nightstar. I’m here for-”

A gasp from the porch cut the lawwoman off, and Eden unsteadily descended.

“You’re here for me,” she said quietly. “And that’s not good.”

 

 

Alonso Araya Torres knew he was dreaming right away.

In the dream, he was walking through a shadowy forest, with trees so tall their tops disappeared into the clouds, but this wasn’t what tipped him off. Mardy was walking next to him, and she was speaking, but that wasn’t the clue either. The thing that made Alonso realize he was dreaming was, in fact, the fact that Mardy was speaking with a Chilean accent.

That was silly; Mardy was an American mustang, raised by Anglophone New Jorvikers at the Ranger Station. But in this dream world, her voice sounded like his grandmother’s.

“All will be well, child,” she was saying, as they walked further and further into the darkness. The sun- wherever it was- was getting swallowed by the encroaching dark. “They are coming for you.”

 _They are coming for you._ Not usually a reassuring phrase, but when his trusted companion said it, with his grandmother’s voice, he knew that she meant that help was on the way. A warm blanket of calm swept over him, the sun came out, it was blinding-

“Rise an’ shine, sleeping beauties!” The bellow accompanied the bunkhouse door being thrown wide, and lantern light spilled into the room. Alonso snapped back to reality, the harsh reality of his unfortunate situation.

_Unfortunate? More like potentially fatal._

“Up ‘n’ at ‘em, pretty boy!”

Alonso threw the dirt-caked coat he hadn’t washed in a dog’s age over his threadbare shirt and shuffled out the door after the rest of the laborers in his bunkhouse. Ahead of him lay a long day of ignominy and toil. He silently prayed, as he did every morning, that he’d live to see it end.

_Coming for me? They’d do well to hurry._


	2. Allies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learn more about Alonso's disappearance, and Ali, Allison, and Eden make ready to find him.

“Whoa whoa, easy, it’s not as bad as all that.”

 _Dear Aideen,_ thought Allison. Eden had gone pale as a sheet under her horsewoman’s tan, but the change in the indomitable equestrienne ran deeper and older than that. She’d gained a pair of dark circles under her eyes and her habitual smile had disappeared. She looked more than a year older, and it as plain to see that she thought Allison was bringing news of Alonso’s death.

Allison jumped to the ground and took Eden’s hand. “Last time I saw him, he was fine,” she said gravely. “I just need to know if you’ve seen him in the last month.”

“Month?” Eden swayed back slightly. “My last letter from him came five weeks ago. By Express rider!” The last good thing Eden had in her life- her relationship with Deputy Marshal Alonso Araya Torres- was suddenly in jeopardy. Hell, for all she knew he could be  lying long-dead dead in a ditch.

“Should I… leave you two?” Ali twisted a hank of her lacy sleeve, feeling that she was intruding on a private moment. Whoever _he_ was, he must be special.

“Could you kindly tell my parents I’ll not be going home with them?” Eden asked, quietly. “Allison, where was he last known to be?”

Allison took a deep breath, and shot a glance at Ali. She didn’t look like someone deeply entrenched in the sordid affairs of lawbreaking on the plains; what Allison was about to say would likely sound like gibberish to such a refined lady. “He was undercover. Hired out by the Pinkertons. Posing as a labourer on the New Jarlaheim railroad project.”

“Beg pardon?” Ali had suddenly rejoined the conversation. Allison’s eyebrows, knowing she’d misjudged, shot up under her hat.

“The Pinkertons. Damn,” breathed Eden, halfway between disgust and awe.

“My family- our company- Archdotter Enterprises- owns almost a third of the New Jarlaheim line’s stock,” Ali declared. “Should you need me to pull any strings…”

“His last official report was filed, by telegraph, three weeks ago,” Allison interrupted. “He could be perfectly fine, but he missed his last two dispatches. His work crew moves fast, of course, but they should’ve passed through at least two towns with telegram offices. Eden, when he took this assignment he came to me to ask if I would watch his back, so to speak, on your behalf. The Pinkertons’ll give him a massive check if he completes his assignment, enough for land of your own. Enough for another passage to Old Jorvik, and for repairing the land there besides.”

Eden’s breath caught in her throat. Of course he’d put his life on the line to give her the one thing she couldn’t have, her most impossible and secret dream. Of course he’d do it in secret, knowing that telling her meant not going at all- everyone knew how dangerous spying for the Pinkertons could be.

“And you’re going to him now?” Eden asked, grimly.

“That’s my next stop, yes,” Allison said with a nod. “If you hurry and get ready, you can come with me.”

Eden swirled off into the night at a run, towards the Dawnvalley townhouse, without another word. Ali watched her go with an ache in her heart- how awful it must be, knowing the one you love was in danger- then turned to face the Marshal.

“I’ll come too,” she said, not phrasing it as a question. “I’m bored, I’m ambitious, I’m new in town. Nobody at Archdotter Enterprises here in America expects me to do anything but throw parties and bat my eyes, but clearly there’re things going on with our subsidiaries that need… oversight.” She clenched her fists. Allison noticed and raised an eyebrow. “If I can investigate the New Jarlaheim line and help rescue Miss Dawnvalley’s beau, I’ll call that my first strike against those who’d keep me in hoopskirts.”

She had something to prove- that was a formidable tool. Allison would know.

“Can you shoot?” Allison asked, dubiously.

“I was captain of the rifle team at my finishing school,” Ali said, with some affront.

“Do you own… pants?”

“Of course,” Ali huffed. “And a good riding horse, and a tent, and-”

The Marshal made a calming, sweeping motion. “Clearly there’s no dissuading you. Meet us here in half an hour and we’ll ride for New Jarlaheim. Oh- I didn't get your name, ma'am.”

"Aaliyah Archdotter. I'm overseeing my family's business affairs here. And if we're to be travelling companions, I'll ask you to call me Ali."

Allison bit back a rueful smile. There'd been a time when she'd been called Ally, but that time seemed long, long ago. There'd also been a time when she called Alonso Al- but now she was Marshal Nightstar, and he was her Deputy.

"Marshal Allison Nightstar, at your service. But you can call me Allison, when there aren't reprobates about." She tipped her hat, turned her horse and rode for the telegraph office, which was locked, but this wouldn’t be the first time Allison had broken and entered in pursuit of timely dispatches.

Ali stood in the street for a moment, letting her only second thought go slipping away into the night. It felt like she’d only just wiped the last of the dust from her boots. The journey from St. Louis had been arduous- private wagon train under armed guard, by way of the Platte River Road, for her father didn’t trust the trains- and she’d ridden lead every step of the way. She’d had a master class in Western living, under the expert tutelage of a half-Bannock rifleman and guide who had ridden away with a sizeable chunk of her heart.

He’d headed for New Jarlaheim.

 _So maybe my reasons aren’t ironclad in moral rectitude. Fine._ Ali smiled to herself. _It’s high time for some excitement._ And she walked inside to break up the party.

 

 

Alonso wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow and took a minute to lean back against a callused hand. Years spent in the saddle hadn’t prepared his back for this much bending and lifting, bending and lifting, endlessly, brutally. The mountain they were boring into loomed large above him, blocking the sun and chilling the sweat that clung to his filthy clothes.

“Move along, you,” boomed Mr. Andersson, the foreman, good-naturedly. In this hellhole of a railroad camp, the moustachioed foreman was, if not an avenging archangel, at least a respite from the cruelty of the crew boss who ran the non-working hours of the navvies’ lives. Andersson supplied water when Alonso’s canteen was dry, gave the men their full half-hour’s lunch, and, best of all, might just have been respectable enough to be the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s contact within the New Jarlaheim Line. Alonso was still biding his time, waiting for the identity of his ally to be revealed. 

Alonso turned back to his shovel, chipping away at the scar in the mountain that they’d hewn over the past week. If it went anything like last time, they’d spend weeks digging a crater that the dynamite charges would obliterate in a matter of seconds. Then came the cleaning up and the laying down of track- nonstop, at a sprint- until the crew reached the next insurmountable obstacle. Maybe it would be a canyon next time- that was Andersson’s forte, bridges- but Alonso wasn’t hopeful. His crew always seemed to get the most menial jobs.

Which was, he’d quickly figured, why they’d be striking before they reached Goldenhill.

Mr. Andersson might be a fair man, but the Line was as perfectly crooked as its tracks were straight. Alonso looked at the men toiling around him and fury and fear clawed at his heart. These were good men, hard workers, deserving of so much more than the abuse Line gave out. The fact that he was Judas among them sat heavy in his soul, and he hoped that the mysterious  _they_ would come and deliver him from this dilemma soon.


	3. Visions and Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they ride through the night, Allison, Eden, and Ali reflect on the past year and their reasons for embarking on a dangerous quest. Meanwhile, Alonso has an epiphany

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longest. Chapter. Ever. Y'all enjoy it now, y'hear?

The Marshal rolled up her map and stowed it in a saddlebag. “We’ll ride as far as we can tonight. Our horses will follow the tracks, even if we’re asleep in our saddles.”

Eden nodded curtly and fell in behind Allison as they trotted into darkness. Ali, her spine prickling with trepidation, took up the rear. They rode along the tracks going South-of-East out of town, into darkness.

 

 

 _I was born for this. Of all things._ Allison shook her head at her own resignation to a hard life on the road. She felt herself falling into the familiar lull of long, slow rides under the cover of darkness. Her earliest memories were of this: the jog of a loose-jointed horse beneath her, the creak of saddle leather, the white of the trail against the blue-black of a moonless night, where sky and land blended into one. There were only two truly real things in this world: white trail, the way and the truth, and black other, to be avoided.

 _If only everything else were so cut-and-dried._ Allison had been born to quiet country folk- probably- but raised by outlaws. When as a young adult she’d soured on them, she’d sought to use her training in espionage and rough riding for good, and had answered a recruiting flier for the New Jorvik Rangers. Two years of intense training had proven her worth- and introduced her to Alonso. The pang in her heart when she thought of his absence was real and sharp, but platonic; Allison’s heart had belonged to another during her time at the Ranger Academy. Alonso had been her best friend and confidante, someone safe and reassuring in a world that seemed bent on tearing her apart. On the one side was the promise of respectable, important, exciting work for the Rangers. On the other was her shadowy past, and the implication (raised, betimes, by her superior officers) that it tainted her hopes to become a lawman. Alonso had been willing to stand with her in the middle, and back to back they’d fought off the hardships brought by each half of her identity.

 _Javier._ Allison couldn’t recall the academy without feeling the dart still lodged in her heart from his betrayal. They’d been so much alike. Javier had also overcome unsavoury origins- he’d grown up in hiding, the son of fugitive revolutionaries and crossed the Rio Grande to escape retribution- to earn a spot with the Rangers, and like Allison battled those demons every day. Like her, he was preternaturally inclined to excel at marksmanship, covert operations, tracking, and the like. Competition in their classes had turned into a bright-burning flame whose light colored Allison’s first few years out of the Academy. Assigned to the same platoon, they were unstoppable: making out on stakeouts, bringing in bank robbers and bandits by the score, acing every drill and exercise with flying colors, neck and neck. That was before the platoon commandant made Javier an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he began drifting away from Allison. First it was unexplained secret missions. Then it was a flashy new horse, pockets full of coin that weren’t there before, and a blind eye turned when plain farming folk were in need. When Allison confronted him about it, Javier had tried to recruit her for the shadowy aramilitary force operating behind the false front of the Rangers. They acted as an army for hire, pocketed by the highest bidder. They'd had control of the Rangers- until last year.

Allison had exhausted her monthly supply of filthy language rejecting Javier's offer, and it was just a few weeks later that she was summoned before a court martial and drummed out of the Rangers stripped of her badges. Javier, she knew, hurt by rejection and afraid that she knew too much, had thrown her under, and it was that added insult that had pulled her back to her former life as the Golden Bandit.

 _But those days are behind me, again._ Like a pendulum, she’d swung back to the side of the Rangers. After the Battle for New Jorvik, Allison and Alonso, with the help of a talented local lawyer, had brought charges against the New Jorvik Rangers at the territorial court. The leadership of the peacekeeping force had been fired and new, uncompromised officers instated as commandants and marshals. Allison’s prize for leading the charge was a coveted spot as Marshal of the ninth squadron, with Alonso as her Deputy. He’d accepted the post, though it meant postponing his wedding and retirement from the force, and now Allison understood why. Eden had been heartbroken when her dreams of moving to Old Jorvik and restoring her ancestral home had been squashed by the events of last year. Alonso had been willing to pay any price to secure his fiancee’s happiness- even, it seemed, accepting a dangerous undercover mission on the railroad.

Allison sighed in her half-sleep. Her path had not been an easy one since donning the Marshal’s badge. The newly trained Rangers in her squad were loyal and brave, and they’d already proven themselves to be capable under her command. They’d broken up a ring of cattle rustlers, put a handful of wanted train robbers behind bars, and even guarded the territorial governor one her tour of New Scandinavia. But the prejudice against a former outlaw wearing a Marshal’s badge was still very present, and Allison’s superiors knew just where to twist to make her hurt. They knew she’d propose clemency whenever an outlaw was arrested for anything short of murder. They knew she was apt to follow the dictates of her conscience rather than the exact letter of the law.

That’s why she’d assigned herself, alone, to the search for Alonso- because she needed time and distance to decide if this was what she really wanted. Allison had just been forced to watch a horse thief she’d helped apprehend face the gallows. _Agniezska Ironsmith._ The Marshal’s throat tightened whenever she remembered the young woman, from a gang much like Allison’s old gang. She hadn’t even been the instigator of the theft, but she’d been the only one caught, and against Allison’s increasingly frantic protestations, the Captain of the Rangers had recommended the mandated punishment for her offense. _Death by hanging from the neck._

_I didn’t rejoin the Rangers to condemn common thieves to death. I didn’t return to see my best friend forced to spy for the Pinkertons._

A new sound in the quiet night roused Allison from her trancelike reverie- or maybe it was her anger flaring hot against the backs of her eyelids. A train was coming.

 

 ...

 

Behind Allison in the line of riders, Eden was getting her first good night’s sleep in weeks.

Sleeping in the saddle was an essential skill for a wrangler, and the cold, clean night air acted on her like a sleeping draught. The nights she’d spent tossing and turning in her hard, lonely bunkhouse cot or staring at the ceiling in her parents’ fine house had been countless, and her body and mind were ready to surrender to unconsciousness.

Eden’s dashed hopes, sense of futility, and anxiety over Alonso’s safety melted into the inky night as Phoenix jogged down the silvery road. The tension that she’d held in her shoulders since seeing the destruction on Jorvik melted away, although Eden wasn’t there to feel it and sigh in relief; she had been transported, in her dreaming state, to another Old Jorvik.

Eden had never been to the version of the island in her dreams, but she knew it on sight like an old friend. The rolling green hills across the river, the stately old farmhouse surrounded by barns and pastures, the tall trees… this was the Dawnvalley farm as her grandparents recalled it. They’d emigrated to America to escape some unspeakable evil when Eden’s father had been a boy, and raised their granddaughter on tales of their beautiful homeland.

It had been Eden’s ambition, since before she could remember, to return there and make it _her_ homeland. That’s why she’d been wrangling for the Moorlands and working double shifts at the Wolfpack for almost a decade. That’s why she resisted her parents’ insistence that she act the part of an heiress and elite horse breeder- she knew their money was tied up in the new world, and she’d have to make her own way across America, then across the ocean to home.  That’s why she’d almost considered turning coat during the battle of New Jorvik and assisting Willow and her shadowy employer- because her goal was certain.

It was also something that had brought her, once upon a time, close to Alonso.

Eden had still been a girl in knee-skirts when Alonso had shown up on the Dawnvalley ranch. He was a lanky teenager whose English was beautifully accented and who could ride like a centaur. It had been love at first sight- at least on Eden’s part- but it took a few years to convince Alonso that she was more than just the boss’s horse-crazy daughter. The first grown-up conversation they’d had- the one that changed things- had happened when Eden was fourteen.

And the dream took her back to the ranch in New Jorvik, six years ago.

It was right after her grandmother’s funeral. Edda Dawnvalley had lived to be 92, and young Eden had already mourned her grandfather the year before, but this death was hitting her harder than anything ever had before. Her grandparents had not only been some of her closest confidantes but also her one living link to Old Jorvik, where she’d always longed to go. Now, they were both gone, and Eden, clad in black, was huddled in the stall of the gentlest mare on the ranch, sniffling into a hanky and clutching the pocketknife her grandmother had given her for her last birthday.

“A girl of fourteen ought to be properly armed,” grandmother Edda had said sensibly. “And she should always carry a piece of her roots with her.” The handle of the knife was burnished oak, hewn from a branch of the tree that grew in the dooryard in Old Jorvik.

Alonso had happened upon Eden and knelt down next to her in the straw. He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“It’ll be fine, _mi cielita,_ ” he said quietly. This last part made Eden stop mid-hiccup; Alonso had been careful to rarely use Spanish around the New Jorvegians. Wanted to fit in.

“When I left Punta Arenas, I knew I’d never seen my grandmother again,” he continued. “But when my ship landed at San Francisco, there was, miraculously, a letter from her waiting for me. Somehow it’d beaten my ship. Since then, I like to think she’s always watching over me. Edda wouldn’t want you to cry your eyes out for her; she’d want you to stand up and live like she were watching you.”

“Alonso, why did you leave?” Eden blurted.

Alonso smiled, not at all taken aback. “Why did I leave Chile, you mean? Why did I take passage on a guano carrier to get here, then ride for weeks to beg for a job in a strange land?”

Eden nodded emphatically. He’d never told anyone before. Not a lot of questions got asked in the West.

“Because war was imminent, and my grandmother knew I’d be taken in the fighting if I stayed,” he said gently. “They’re still fighting, and I know I can never go home until there’s peace. But she was watching over me; she helped pay for my ticket here, and I have a beautiful life here in New Jorvik because of her.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Eden said around the lump in her throat.

“I got to meet you because of her,” Alonso added. “Now brush yourself off; I could use some help teaching the new gelding to lead.” He turned to walk back outside.

“Alonso?”

“Yes, Eden?” the way he said her name made her heart skip a beat.

“What’s guano?”

Alonso threw his head back and laughed. “Birdshit. They use it to make explosives, and I came here on a ship full of it!”

Eden pulled a face. “You’re brave,” she announced.

“Not as brave as you. You’ll see.”

And with a snap, Eden was back in Old Jorvik.

But now the ranch was as she’d seen it last: scorched earth, rubble where the flagstone foundations had stood. The mighty oak that had shaded the yard was now a twisted stump, still vast but laid low by fire and the axe.

It was pulling Eden towards it.

“You’ll see,” said a voice from the stump. “You’ll see.”

And a bolt of white light burst into Eden’s consciousness, through the layers of the dream and back into the night, where a train was bearing down on them.

...

 

At the back of the pack, Ali was wide awake.

_The time for featherbeds and petit fours is over. It’s time to prove myself, and I was not made for comfort. No matter what anyone says._

The road reeling out ahead of her could have been exchanged with many lengths of the road between St. Louis and New Jorvik. And when she let her waking mind wander, to keep it from straying into dangerous, brooding territory, it went back to the recent past.

Ali’s old life in Old Jorvik was ancient history, as far as she was concerned. All her life, she’d been striving to break free of the conventions that relegated her to the background while men did the negotiating for power and wealth. Find a rich husband. Bend him to your will. But never, ever show your hand. That was the advice she'd been given, time and again, and the advice that she'd flouted from the time that she learned what it meant to properly flout.

 _Albert._ Her cousin Albert, a charmingly vacuous playboy, had been Ali’s ticket to ride. He couldn’t have cared less about taking up the Archdotter mantle of responsibility for a multinational corporation and the millions of shillings that entailed. He was glad to give his mathematics exercises to Ali while he went foxhunting. That evolved into Ali dressing as her cousin- they were both slight of build and fair of complexion- and taking his exams for him at university when she should have been in elocution lessons. By the time Albert was slated to sail for the new world, Ali knew just what to bribe him with- a new waistcoat and a flashy piebald hunter- to convince him to run off to the Continent rather than cross the sea and seize his destiny. While Ali stuffed pillows in his berth (“Bert’s already seasick tied to the pier, poor soul!”) and bade her parents a carefully tearful farewell for the both of them, Albert was winging his way to Paris to drink absinthe and write sprightly verse.

A train, from New York to the Mississippi, then a wagon train the rest of the way. Ali had been practically in hives waiting for her massive collection of baggage- trousseau and a dowry of silver for her, crates of records and a handsome mahogany desk for the absent Albert- to be stowed and for a professional team of guards and guides to assemble. She flatly refused a matronly chaperone, and chose to ride, in breeches, at the front of the caravan, with a loaded pistol in her belt and one eye open at all times.

And through that ever-open eye, her new world was revealed. It spilled out in front of her like a waking dream: endless rivers, mountains that touched the stars, glaciers, vast deserts, skies that might swallow a person whole. She was intoxicated by the land, and also by the fact that not a soul in America could stop her from taking Archdotter Enterprises in hand once she reached New Jorvik. This world was hers… so why not live a little?

Rolf was perhaps even more beautiful than all the glories of America, and he rode one pace in front of her for the whole trip. Well, most of the trip anyway; she didn’t hear him utter a word for the first week. He was the lead guide, always sending scouts ahead to look for a ford in a river or a safe place to weather a windstorm. Rolf knew the trail like the back of his hand, and it wasn’t long before Ali was riding next to him, asking questions at just the right moment. It was a milestone when, on day twenty-seven, she heard him laugh for the first time at some terrible pun she made with the word “escarpment.” That laugh topped chimney rock, the mighty Platte, and seeing her first herd of bison. By the time they glimpsed the Rockies, beyond which, she knew, New Jorvik lay, Ali and Rolf were as inseparable as two could be within the bounds of propriety. Often they wouldn’t exchange more than a few sentences all day, but they were within reach of each other for weeks upon weeks, staring up at the same sky to navigate by the same stars. Rolf made Ali feel like she had an ally in the new world.

It all came crashing down when the wagon train rolled through New Jorvik and stopped at the gate to a stately home whose lintel was carved with the name “ARCHDOTTER.” In a flurry of unlading and meeting her new staff, not to mention explaining away Albert’s curious absence, she’d hardly had a moment to bid Rolf farewell. When she finally found him saddling his horse, her heart sank like a stone.

“Where will you go?” she’d asked, as airily as she could.

“Out towards New Jarlaheim, I reckon. I have a job down there.” 

“Very well then-” Ali was glad that he’d lightly taken her hand and laid the softest of kisses against it, for she hadn’t known how to finish her sentence anyway.

Then he’d ridden off, and she’d turned around to face her own purloined destiny.

That had been a few months past, and Ali had filled her time with shareholder meetings, mine inspections, and countless inane soirees. Nobody, at this stage, even remembered that the new Archdotter in town had been meant to be an Albert and not an Ali. Rolf was the only one in America that knew _that_ full story.

Ali didn’t really need to make a personal visit to the newest sections of the New Jarlaheim line. Her family’s interest in it was negligible compared to the many mines, quarries, and refineries they’d snapped up in the West. But this was the first she’d heard about labor unrest, the involvement of Pinkertons, and potential abuses of power on the New Jarlaheim Line. A visit wouldn’t be outside the realm of her responsibilities.

Would it?

And if she ran into Rolf along the way, well; some things were just destined to be. And Aaliyah Archdotter was used to having control of her destiny.

She was ready for the train when it rounded the bend, headlights slicing through the night and into her reverie. She followed Allison and Eden’s lead down the embankment to wait for the shower of sparks and earsplitting racket to pass before they rejoined the path towards Goldenhill.

 

 ...

 

 

“On your feet, ladies!”

The crew boss aimed a swift kick at a sleeping form on his way out the bunkhouse door, and Alonso was sure he’d heard a crunch. The kicked man groaned in pain. As was usual in such situations, common as they were, Alonso’s mind flew to his secret of secrets: rolled up in a filthy pair of socks, inside a wool vest, at the bottom of his rucksack, Alonso had brought along his Ranger badge. It kept company with his few telegrams from the Pinkertons- telegrams he’d purposely stopped looking for when his conscience began to bother him. It would be so easy to grab his badge, twist the crew boss's arm behind his back, and arrest him in the name of the law. But that would blow his five-thousand-dollar cover. 

 _Spotter. Plant. Agent provocateur._ Alonso’s conscience liked to berate him with the derogatory names that came with his mission. He was getting paid a pretty penny to spy on the unionizing workers, report back to the detective agency, and then sit back and watch as, someday soon, armed mercenaries came riding in off the plains to beat his companions into a starved, bludgeoned submission. His mind flew back to the day when he’d been summoned to Ranger headquarters, at a suspiciously late hour. A man in a suit too clean for this neck of the woods had been sitting in Commandant Violet’s chair, smoking a cigar. He thrust forth a shining card emblazoned with an eye and the slogan _we never sleep._

“Read that. Then burn it.”

Alonso stared at the card. The card stared back.

“Burn it. Now,” the suit rasped around his cigar.

Alonso calmly lifted a burner on the potbellied stove and tossed the card in, all the while maintaining eye contact with the suit- the _Pinkerton_ suit. Alonso surmised that this was one of the covert recruiters for the morally dubious detective agency.

“We have a proposition for you, and your commandant has given us the OK. Deputy Arraya Torres, how would you like five thousand dollars, all for a month of sweat and a watchful eye?”

Alonso gulped. Eden. Old Jorvik. Rebuilding. This, it seemed, would be his only chance. “Go on,” he said.

“We’re in need of a trustworthy young man- a man who’s already proven his loyalty to the territory. Your role in rebuilding the Rangers suggests that you can’t be bought out by corruption. And you speak Spanish, dontcha?”

Alonso nodded. Why did he feel like a rabbit in a snare?

“Good. Good. Where we’re sending you, it’s the leaning tower of Babel. It’s a regular linguistics department. Only lingo they don’t speak’s English.” And the Pinkerton man spat on the floor.

That part, in retrospect, had been only the first of the many falsehoods Alonso had gotten off the Pinkertons. It was true that most of his brothers in the trenches of the New Jarlaheim Line were recent immigrants- Italy, China, Egypt, Russia, and yes, Chile- and most of them stuck to their mother tongues when the bosses were around. But most of them had also picked up a good bit of English on their travels, or at least enough to know who the foreman intended to send into the pit with the dynamite. And when the next strike meeting was.

 _The wildcat strike_ \- wildcat, because their union was informal- was to begin in one week’s time. Without his dispatches to the Agency, the Line’s bigwigs had no inkling of its existence. If Alonso could keep his head down for one week, he could escape in the melee, find Eden, whisk her away to Old Jorvik, change his name and his nationality and live out his days as if this nightmare had never happened. If only he could just keep his head down.

As he headed towards the work site, some corner of Alonso's mind registered that a new group of recruits was disembarking from a wagon. Must be replacements for the men we lost in the last blast. He shouldered his pickaxe and sent his mind back through the months, to dwell on better times while his body toiled.

Until, that is, he ran headfirst into a solid wall of man.

"Sorry, wasn't looking where I was-"

Alonso looked up into the tanned face of the wall.

" _Chileno,_ " said the wall in greeting, and tipped his hat with a familiar grin.

"Javier," breathed Alonso.


	4. Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the womenfolks zero in on their target, Alonso is faced with a difficult choice

The train passed without incident, sending a shower of sparks down the bank. After regaining their track the search party had made good time. By sunrise they were crossing the Whitemantle river. By noon, they were bedded down in a grove of pines overlooking the tracks, their horses fed and watered and drowsing with drooping ears. It was just a catnap, however, and by Allison’s calculations they would reach the last reported location of the end of the line by morning.

 

“I hope we don’t find anything too dire,” Ali commented. “The horses will need a good rest before we go anywhere else.”

They were riding three abreast. The wide road cut next to the tracks by the railway crew months ago was still free and clear; the closer they got to the end of the line, the less overgrown it became. Eden’s spine kept prickling as she thought, _he was just here._ She could see _him_ resting against that boulder, drinking from the spring, driving home that spike, one of millions.

Eden snapped out of her reverie in time to nod. “Goldenhill- and a hotel, and a stable, and a sheriff- isn’t too far from the terminus, right, Allison?” Silence reigned. “Allison?”

 

Allison had been using the daylight to scrutinize a map of the countryside. She’d been at it for hours, and often slowed Flint to line the scrawlings on the map up with the real mountains and tracks around them.

 

“Alonso’s last report came from a shantytown we’ve already passed- Uppsala? Not very fitting- but that’s weeks old. Since then they’ve found their way, somehow, over a granite-strewn cliff and now-”

“ _That_ granite-strewn cliff?” Ali gestured ahead.

Eden grimaced. Allison sighed and pulled out her telescope for the umpteenth time that day.

A tunnel had been blasted straight through the cliff. There was no road around it.

“The horses sure won’t like that,” Eden offered.

Ali stroked Calypso’s neck to keep calm. She didn’t want her anxiety telegraphing down the reins to her refined mare before it was due.

Allison smashed her telescope closed with a bit more force than was really necessary. “Now, they’ve probably broached the Sarek range. They’ll be taking the path of least resistance- so West, missing the foothills, but they’ll be tunnelling when they reach _this_.” She pulled Flint to a stop and spread the map out for Ali and Eden to see.

The spidery topographic lines- it was a Stoneground map, headachingly rich in detail- dipped into a jagged cut right where Allison’s finger pointed.

“Lonesome Valley,” she said flatly. “Known alternately, through the years, as _Ditahandɨ Bahunubi_ and… Garnok’s Valley.”

“What?”

“That’s right. They’re currently digging and blasting their way through a literal hell pit,” Allison said angrily. “Goldenhill’s on the other side”

 

 

_Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit._

Alonso was hacking furiously at the Northern slope of Lonesome Valley, taking his frustration out on a million metric tons of metamorphic rock. _Of all the people to show up here, it had to be Javier. The least predictable person I know. Shit._

Alonso had already sat too long on the knowledge of the wildcat strike to make a good showing to the Pinkertons. If he made a belated report now, they’d think him incompetent, or guess the truth: that his passivity had allowed the strike to gain momentum. Already codewords and clandestine meetings had been rolling around the camp and the track. They’d be laying down their tools and walking to Andersen’s tent to demand change in just a few days.

 _Which is the kicker._ Somewhere in the mining camp, the Pinkertons had placed a second contact- someone with a second pair of eyes to cover ground Alonso would miss. Andersen would be a perfect choice- respectable, respect _ed_ , and of high enough rank to get a different perspective from the pick-swinging Deputy Arraya Torres. But it just as likely could be Javier, whose past association with lawmen of questionable morals made him a natural fit for the Agency.

If the Pinkertons had sent word to Alonso as to who the contact was, it was in one of the unopened telegrams he’d left at the post offices of Uppsala and Marstal.

Should he approach Andersen or Javier bout being the contact? Or should he flee?

Alonso gave a guttural roar and buried his pick in an especially hard vein of quartz. He hadn’t had any more dreams, of Mardy or his _abuela_ or of Eden. The dreams had deserted him when he needed them most.

He hoped the saviours from his dreams were just over the next hill.

 

 

Over the next hill, as a thin sliver of moon rose, Allison, Eden, and Ali spotted the distant campfires of the end of the line making a halo dance above the slopes. It was the only light for miles and miles. Calypso’s white face was the only visible sign of their presence in this land.

“…and I was hoping, honestly, that our paths would cross again,” Ali was finishing. After forty-eight hours on the trail she finally felt comfortable enough with Eden and Allison to tell them about Rolf. It felt wonderful to get that presence off her chest. She hadn’t been friends with women her own age for years- too many secrets to keep.

“I’ve not been to one of these camps before, but odds are he’ll be easy to find,” Allison answered. “They keep the navvies and the bosses and the engineers and the teamsters and the scouts separated- otherwise they’ll collude, you know? Start a riot. Unionize.”

“We’ll help you search,” Eden assured her. “Maybe Alonso knows him!”

“From what you’ve told me of your intended, it sounds like they have a lot in common,” Ali offered. “Tall, dark, and handsome, love of the outdoors, an affinity for animals…”

Eden couldn’t help but smile. In fact, she’d been smiling more this trip than she had all year, and sleeping and eating and feeling better to boot. Yes, her true love was in uncertain peril; yes, she hadn’t seen the underside of a roof or more than a swallow of clean water since leaving New Jorvik; but now, she had a purpose. She could focus her energy and unruly thoughts on the goal ahead, and the goal was a matter of life or death.

“Do we need to find you a swarthy outdoorsman to love, Marshal?” Ali was asking, teasingly. She’d been trying to crack Allison’s no-nonsense frown since they’d set off.

Allison chuckled. “Trust me, I’ve learned my lesson about such men. I like to think I’m married to the badge nowadays, anyway; keeps me out of trouble.” But the brightness in her voice was a touch too brittle. Allison had valued the time away from her fellow Marshals and Commandants and Captains, their polished manners and hardline verdicts. Riding the range was what she knew. If she had to be married to something, this would be it: big sky, not a soul for as far as the eye could see. Except for the glow over the hills.

“Morning’ll come soon,” she said, changing the subject before she could wax sappy. “When we reach the camp, we’ll have to think fast. If things seem under control and Alonso’s assuredly safe, we stick together. We find him, pay whatever piper there is to be paid, and get the hell outta Dodge. If there’s unrest, that’s another story.”

“If there’s unrest, I’ll go straight to the foreman!” Ali declared.

“If there’s a foreman left,” Allison countered. “If things are bad enough for Pinkertons to plant a spy, we can’t count on a civilized welcome. If that’s the case, three separate newcomers, women at that, will attract much less attention than a group. So we split up- and meet back up at a set time, Alonso or no.”

Alonso or no. Eden clenched a fist around her loosely-held reins. Whatever Allison and Ali decided, she wasn't leaving Lonesome Valley without her man.


	5. A Case of Mistaken Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ladies have each found their man, but things can get confusing when you're hunting and hunted by three tall, dark, handsome horsemen.

And so, before dawn, three women infiltrated the camp, one at a time, each with her own motives. Eden wanted to pluck Alonso out of harm’s way and run; Allison wanted to assure Alonso’s safety, gather evidence of potential lawbreaking, and abscond; and Ali was torn between finding Rolf’s trail and marching directly in to confront the outfit’s leadership.

They each kept their thoughts to themselves as they led their horses to the outskirts of the sleeping camp. The rails ended here: bunkhouses, thrown together against the rain, reached out like fingers from a central office, built with slightly more care. Tents housing tools and provisions sprang up haphazardly like oversized mushrooms. This camp, Allison assessed, was not meant to be long for this world. As soon as the mountain was conquered, they’d be moving on.

The dray horses and gentlemen’s mounts paced nervously in a brush corral, ears pricked towards the newcomers. Allison, Eden, and Ali quietly unsaddled their mounts and let them into the enclosure. With saddles stashed in a vacant shack, they renewed their promise to meet at dusk on the Goldenhill side of the mountain. A narrow pass, scrawled through the crenelated peaks by a surveyor’s hand, was all they had by way of escape. With a final round of handshakes, they dispersed into the waking camp.

 

Eden slid towards the pump, sure Alonso would want a drink or a splash for his face first thing in the morning. She’d pulled her hair up under her hat, smeared some dirt on her face, and pulled on a dingy coat. Lounging in the shadows, she could have been any puny workman.

 

Allison had pulled her duster over her badge- just in case- and was striding, in plain sight, towards the doors of the office. As soon as someone moved inside, she’d give her most official knock.

 

Ali had thought about going with Allison, but knew that once she revealed herself as a representative of means there’d be no chance to seek Rolf. So she doubled back to the remuda, hoping to spot Rolf’s splashy mare among the herd. That would at least let her know if he was here.

 

 

Alonso awoke that morning from uneasy dreams. In his dream, he’d been a part of the hillside overlooking Lonesome Valley, watching the dynamite being laid. Watching the cord run back towards the camp. Watching the men, ant-sized, scurry for cover. Waiting for the explosion.

 

He was still slightly shaken as he, once more, took up his pick and shovel and canteen and headed for the hillside. He was swept, in his daze, right past the water pump by the rumbling tide of men. He wasn’t so shaken as to be surprised, however, when a familiar form fell into step next to him.

“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” he muttered conversationally.

Javier spat, good-naturedly. “Can’t say the same of you, _Chileno_.”

Alonso stopped in his tracks, forcing Javier to bump into his shoulder in the half-dark. The moon was just setting. “Who sent you?”

“Sent?” Javier barked out a laugh. “I’m here on my own. When your little town upset the Rangers and their… side business I knew I had to get the hell out. Went South. Waited for things to cool down. Now I’m back to my old tricks, eh?”

“ _Viva la revolucion?_ ”

Javier cracked a smile. Just like old times; his grin could persuade a snake to hold its strike. But maybe that was because they were kin. “Back on the right wrong side of the law. And you…?”

Alonso narrowed his eyes. Could he trust Javier this time? Was he a Pinkerton snake or an honest agitator? _Only one way to find out._

“Rather not say.”

Alonso felt the soft press of a barrel, small but deadly, nudge into his side. “Feel like changin’ your tune?” Javier drawled.

Alonso raised his hands slightly and pivoted, with a smile. “Rather not say.”

Javier’s eyebrows flew together. “Then you force my hand. Pardner. I’ll be watching.” And he withdrew the gun.

Alonso was a split second too late. It was still dawning on him, as dawn broke over the valley, that Javier was raising his gun hand into the air; that Javier was firing three times in rapid succession; that that was the code to begin the strike, early, in an emergency, if they’d been discovered.

Javier tipped his hat and melted into the suddenly tumultuous sea of shouting navvies.

The strike was on.

 

Allison heard the gunshots from her place propping up a wall to the New Jarlaheim Line’s local office. Her knock hadn’t raised a soul, but in moments footsteps were thundering down the steps, out the door, and towards the commotion at the mountainside.

_Maybe I should have shot first._

Allison eyed the backs racing away from her- some fine suits, uniformed guards- and looked back through the swinging door into the office. Empty.

Without a second thought, the officer of the peace swept inside the building and, after a moment, locked the door behind her. She turned to the massive mahogany desk that dominated the room, and cracked her knuckles.

 

At the gunfire the horses spooked and suddenly were racing the perimeter of the corral, jostling and kicking. Ali backed into the middle of the pen, desperately trying to identify one bay paint out of a wheeling mass of horseflesh.

 _Shit. Now I’m trapped. Classic, city girl._ She was still chiding herself when she spotted it: a red-and-white horse, cantering straight towards her.

Was it Winddancer? Ali didn’t have time to parse. She sidestepped the oncoming mare and executed the sort of stunt that would have had her equitation master at finishing school break out in a panic. She grabbed the mare’s skewbald withers and, in a flash, was racing along with the herd, bareback.

“Take me to him, girl,” she whispered in the mare’s ear.

 

Eden had let herself be carried along by the crush of muttering men rubbing sleep from their eyes on their way to the mountainside, all the while frantically looking around for Alonso. _Not even a bite to eat before work? No wonder they’re striking._

There had to be a hundred, two hundred, more workers spilling into the morning, but when the shots rang out they all fell silent.

“You heard them! Strike!” shouted a voice into the void.

The collective roar that rose into the still air was like to split Eden’s eardrums, and she knew she had to act fast. As the men threw down their picks and shovels, hammers and spikes, and began to turn back towards the camp, Eden seized the man nearest her by the arm.

“Please, sir, I’m looking for a man…”

He shook her off. She turned and was bowled over by a man the size of a steam engine. The crowd was running, now; Eden covered her head with her arms and felt hobnail boots go glancing off her sides. Then, she was airborn.

Eden was set on her feet and brushed off by rough hands. The mob was storming towards camp; she was left all alone, face to face with a tall man whose face was shaded by his hat.

“Thank you, so much, now can you help me find a man?”

“What kind of man?”

“Tall. Dashing. Speaks Spanish.” She had no idea if Alonso was using an alias or not- and realized, a second too late, that her gruff faux-man-voice had lapsed. Eden gulped.

“ _Hay uno aquí._ ” A wolfish grin appeared from under the brim’s shadow.

“Thank you, sir, I’ll continue my search-”

The man grabbed her arm as she turned away. “I think I know the man you’re after, Eden,” the man said smoothly. “In fact, I’m after him too.”

 

Alison slid behind the massive desk and commenced to rifle. She pushed aside payroll slips, purchase orders for dynamite and cattle, and countless telegrams. _Where would…? Aha._

A small safe, flat and wide, sat in the bottom of the centre drawer. If there was clandestine correspondence in this desk, this would be its hiding place.

She had halfway cracked the code, holding the safe up to her ear, when she heard a floorboard creak behind her.

Allison, impulse taken over by instinct, reacted: since she had no time to discard the safe, draw her gun, and aim, she simply threw the safe with all her might in the direction of the creak. In the split second it took her to turn around, her target had sidestepped the projectile but, shockingly, wasn’t aiming anything at her. Average height, swarthy, jet-black hair that brushed his shoulders. Her heart resumed its beating; at first glance, he’d looked like Javier. He must have come in through a side door. 

Alison briefly flashed her badge. “New Jorvik Rangers. Marshal Alison Nightstar. What can you tell me about this strike, sir?”

The man seemed to breathe a small sigh of relief. “Nothing I can tell you that won’t be in that safe, ma’am,” he said, quietly. “I just scout for the Line; knew this strike was coming, of course, but I’ve been gone marking the way to Goldenhill. Just returned last night.” He quirked a smile. “Poor timing.” 

Alison’s synapses were firing. This man fit the description of Ali’s Rolf; too, he’d been over the mountain towards Goldenhill. Just where she and her companions were bound. She had to choose her next words carefully.

“May I ask what you’re seeking in this office?” she asked, calmly.

A muscle in Rolf’s jaw twitched.

“You can speak freely to me, I’m here investigating corruption and mistreatment of the workers,” she said. “I won’t fault you for wanting to use this opportunity to your advantage.”

Rolf’s shoulders relaxed. “I meant to find the Line’s maps,” he admitted. “It’s unlikely they’d survive whatever pandemonium’s coming, and I’m not getting paid until we reach Goldenhill. Those maps are my proof of the work that the other scouts and I’ve done.”

Allison grabbed the sheaf of maps from beneath her pile of detritus and handed them over. “Then be my guest.” Rolf turned to go. “Only…”

He turned back, reluctantly.

“Only if you stick close to me, you’ll have your maps _and_ the pleasure of Aaliyah Archdotter’s company.”

Rolf, to his credit, kept his cool, but Allison noted the color rise to his cheeks. “You aiming to get out of here, once you’ve cracked the safe?”

“I am.”

Rolf pulled his pistol and shot the lock straight off the safe. “Follow me, I-”

It was then that the first brick smashed through the first window, followed by a flaming twist of canvas.

 

 

Ali squeezed her eyes shut as the paint mare under her surged over the fence and into the melee. They dodged shouting, brawling men until the mare pulled up short outside of a bunkhouse.

Ali jumped to the ground and took one last look at the mare. She, at least, seemed certain, so Ali crashed inside to find- not Rolf.

The man hurriedly throwing a rucksack together was not Rolf. His hair was too light, and short, and he had freckles. This was apparent, as he was staring at her, eyes wide in distress.

In his hand- almost in his rucksack- was a New Jorvik Ranger's badge.

“Alonso!” Ali burst out. It _had_ to be him.

“Do I…?”

“Ali Archdotter. I’m here with Eden and Allison, to rescue you.”

“You’re _them_!” Alonso grinned suddenly, and Ali could see precisely how he’d earned the reputation for being one of the handsomest men in New Jorvik.

“Uh- yes! And I found your horse. A case of mistaken identity, really, but I’m glad it worked out.”

“Mardy!” Alonso had pocketed his badge and slung his rucksack over his shoulder. “Then let’s find the others and get out of here. But first…”

“Way ahead of you,” Ali said, swinging the door open and hastening into the open. “The Marshal’s already appropriating any incriminating documents from the Line office for you. I need to get my horse, see if an acquaintance of mine is here, and then-”

A massive explosion rocked the camp. The world seemed to perform a backflip. Ali was thrown to the ground. She scrambled to her feet; Alonso was already on his feet, calming a prancing Mardy, but something was wrong.

Terribly wrong.

All around them, the camp had been set alight.


	6. Release

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three sticky situations develop, and, to various degrees, worsen or improve or both.

“Are they after you?”

Rolf and Allison had ducked below the absurdly large desk, maps and safe cradled in their arms.

Allison grimaced. “I was careful sneaking into the camp; more likely they think some of the bigwigs are still inside. How’d you get in?”

She could smell smoke from outside. _This wildcat strike was really more of a riot, wasn’t it?_ She hoped that, somewhere, negotiations had at least started before the first punch or incendiary was thrown.

It was then that the whole building was shaken by the explosion; evidently, some stray sparks had found their way to one of the far-flung dynamite depositories. Or, someone had meant to set it off. Where _was_ Alonso?

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Allison instructed. “I just hope someone had the good sense to release the horses.”

 

 

Somehow, despite the strange tilt of things and the ringing in their ears, Ali and Alonso (with Mardy in tow) had managed to clamber back to the brush corral. Things were dire; parts of the fence were burning and the herd inside was panicked.

Ali gulped. She hadn’t bargained for a stampede in the making when she planned for this trip. She’d been expecting tense negotiations, sure, and some heavy-handed lecturing, but not fire and tumult. _Ah well. Into the breach._

Alonso shucked his jacket- what was left of it, anyway, it had seen a lot- and covered the spiny branches. He began tugging at the fence. Ali closed her eyes and rifled through her mental files, searching for some pearl of wisdom that Rolf had imparted to her concerning stampedes and burning fences. Nothing. She spotted the gate- engulfed in flames- and was struck with an epiphany.

Ali put two fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly. She spotted Calypso screech to a halt in the corral, ears swivelling towards her. If her half-thoroughbred mare couldn’t make this jump, over a slapdash bush, she’d eat her hat. And Ali knew, from finishing school, from the trail across the country, from watching herds of bison and flocks of geese and schools of minnows when she gathered water at the river’s edge: these horses would follow a leader.

Ali ran to an as-yet clear section of fence and started cooing, at a yell, to her mare.

“Sweet girl! You can do it! Just one little jump!”

Alonso looked up and made a face as if to say _you’re crazy._ But he abandoned his smouldering jacket and led Mardy over to join her. 

Calypso paced, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, and was nearly sideswiped by a huge draught horse. That seemed to do it for her; as if gathering herself to leap a fence in pursuit of a fox, she cantered neatly up to the fence and, in a twinkling, was over it.

Ali barely had time to leap aboard as the rest of the herd took note and came thundering through. Soon the fence was trampled down, so that even the odd goat kept in the enclosure was running free.

Ali wiped soot and sweat from her brow and took a second to relax against Calypso’s withers.

“Well done, Miss Archdotter,” Alonso said with a lopsided smile. “Now, there’s someone after me, and we need to reconnect with Eden and Allison before he finds us. Shall we ride on?”

 

 

 

Javier had dragged Eden, wrist clamped in his viselike hand, away from the fray. At first she’d struggled, but when she had to dodge a savage kick she went quietly and sullenly. He’d taken the chance to bind her hands behind her back. Mentally, however, Eden was calculating frantically.

 _This could only be one person._ She’d never seen him before, but _he’d_ seen her. She knew Alonso kept a portrait of her at the Ranger barracks; Eden, typically practical, had only ever had the one portrait taken. Alonso had written her scores of letters mentioning Javier, a charming and skilled Ranger who’d went from being a close friend to a traitor. What other tall, dark, and handsome cowboy would be able to recognize Alonso undercover, and then to visually connect him to Eden, a strange newcomer?

They were loping towards the gash in the valley’s steep side where, Eden imagined, Alonso had been toiling for the past few weeks. Javier yanked her into a cave of sorts, hewn from cold, damp rock. He tossed her into the darkness and stood blocking the entrance. Eden could see, in silhouette, his hand creep to the stock of a pistol at his hip.

“No, your virtue is not in any danger and, before you ask, this was indeed meant to be the plant site for the dynamite,” he said, almost casually. “Now what can you tell me about the good Deputy?”

“I haven’t seen him for months, Javier,” Eden spat, honestly, while trying to grapple with how much information she could afford to give up.

The shadowy figure chuckled. “So I don’t need to introduce myself. Tell me, Eden, what sort of reputation precedes me?”

Eden glared silently.

“I don’t take kindly to obstinance, _querida._ For every question you fail to answer to my satisfaction, I’ll break one of your fiance’s fingers, whenever he comes for you. For every lie you tell me-” Javier gave his pistol, suddenly unholstered, a twirl- “I’ll shoot him once.”

Eden’s eyes blazed, but she knew she had to say something. _Don’t get in the way of yourself. Don’t accidentally give him away- not like with Willow._  Eden shoved that haunting memory, of how she could have accidentally given up her town to corruption, away. “I know you sold your friends for a chance at power.”

Javier was pacing, slowly, executing long, languorous turns. “Not untrue. Though that was a long time ago. Tell me, who is Alonso working for?”

The blood drained from Eden’s face. Because honestly, she didn’t know. Had he turned coat on the Pinkertons? Or was he still in their employ? And did Javier know the difference?

“I- I don’t know,” she admitted. “When we set out-”

“We, is it?” Javier stopped and spun to face her. “Who’s _we_?”

“One of the Rangers came to get me, after Alonso stopped communicating.” Good. No mention of Pinkertons, or naming names. If only-

“ ‘One of the Rangers,’ hmm? There’s only one Marshal dumb enough to risk her neck for a scab like Arraya Torres.” Javier folded his arms, smugly. “Looks like an old flame of mine will be joining us, presently.”

Eden vaguely remembered Alonso writing to her, years ago, that Allison and Javier had been together. _So that’s who the tall, dark stranger who had wronged her had been._ Could she milk that, for leverage? If only he’d shut up and let her _think._

 

 

Allison, safe clutched to her chest, pulled her duster over her face and barrelled shoulder-first through a crackling wall. Rolf was right on her heels, maps tucked under his shirt. Allison dropped to the ground and smacked out the flames that lingered on her coat while Rolf drew a revolver and took up a defensive position.

“So do we run for Goldenhill, Marshal?” he asked. “Pick up Aaliyah and your other friends on the way, get the hell outta Dodge?”

Allison was running a reluctant finger over the sheaf of official documentation contained in her safe. Turned over to the courts, this could sink the New Jarlaheim Line so deep in lawsuits that their track would rust into the ground before they could finish it- though, in all likelihood, they’d eventually emerge victorious. But a few things were bothering her conscience. Call it a hunch, or just a vision into the past. Whatever it was, she couldn’t shake it. There were people out there in the fire who'd done little wrong- followed orders, sure, but did they deserve mob violence?

“You go find Miss Archdotter, and if you can rustle up a Chilean navvy and his bride to be, so much the better.” Allison was loading her guns- technically, the two rifles she’d appropriated from the magazine in the office were hers now, right?- methodically, glaring towards the melee past the flames.

“You’re not going in there on foot, alone, to save the railroad bosses’ sorry hides?” Rolf frowned, incredulous. “Are you?”

Allison shoved the sheaf of documents towards him. “Guard them with your life. Well, not really, but try to take good care of them. We’re meeting on the far ridge, then riding for Goldenhill. I’ll try my best to make it.” Allison squared her shoulders. “This just got bigger than any of us.”


	7. Swing Yer Pardner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroes find each other just as fast as they lose some other each others.

Ali and Alonso skirted the brawling, burning ruins of the camp, keeping a sharp eye out for their companions.

“I have no idea where Rolf would be,” Ali admitted, as they pulled up short to recoup behind a boxcar that had been converted into a portable water supply. Winddancer, separated from the herd, was on a long lead behind her, along with a snorting Phoenix, the lone golden back among a veritable herd of brown and white horseflesh. Alonso had also recognized Cochise by his spots, and was leading him. “The only thing I have to go off of is his horse.”

“I don’t know any of the scouts, but-” Alonso spotted a silhouette, bracketed by a pair of rifles, against the flames, getting smaller. Years of familiarity made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The lone rifleman was Allison, sure as there were carts to horses.

“Shit,” he breathed. She was, totally in character, walking headfirst and chin-high into danger, all for the sake of a handful of morally unsound top-hats. But he knew that somewhere in there, Mr. Anderson, Pinkerton operative or not, was fighting for his life, and he felt, not for the first time or last, his heart pulled two ways.

Somewhere out there, Eden was searching for him- and Javier was, too. He prayed their paths hadn’t crossed.

Right in front of him, Allison was striding into a firefight, upholding the Ranger creed to Protect and Defend.

The isolation that had dogged him, awake and asleep, had been replaced by a dense smokescreen of want and need and love. Two of the people that he cared about most in this life were here, but he had to choose one.

_Shit._

“I’ll back you up, if you go,” Ali broke in, jerking her chin towards the fighting. “I just met Allison, but I didn’t meet Rolf that long ago, either, and here I am, wading through a literal firefight, basically for the chance to see him again.” She blushed deep under the grime, but the understanding smile on Alonso’s face told her that people tender to bare their souls to him, often.

Alonso took a second to size her up: small, impeccably dressed despite the smoke and explosions, sitting with the posture of a duchess. “That’s kind and all, but-”

“I can shoot as well as anyone,” Ali stated. “And I’m fucking _fed up_ with people thinking I can’t based on my _posture_.”

Alonso flinched. Had his thoughts been that obvious?

“In fact, I surmise that I’m better armed than you,” Ali continued, leaning over her saddlehorn, as ladylike as if she were peeping into a sugarbowl, peering into Alonso’s gaping rucksack. “You’ve got five shots at best. As noble as your sentiment may be-”

“Then I’ll take the horses,” Alonso breathed, hardly believing that the words were coming out of his mouth. “I’ll find Eden, Rolf if I can, and once they’re safe I’ll come back for you two. Here.” He thrust his badge at Ali.

“I- I don’t understand-”

“I’m deputizing you, Miss Archdotter.”

Ali nodded once and cocked one of her pistols. She knew what she had to do. _From businesswoman to gunman in a split second,_ she reflected. _If only the other shareholders of Archdotter Enterprizes LLC could see me now._

 

 

“I honestly expected them to be here by now.”

Javier was leaning out of the declivity, surveying the turned earth leading from the camp to the mountainside. Eden, for her part, had one hand almost touching the hilt of her pocketknife. She’d thrust it into her waistband when they’d left the horses, and was now kicking herself for not packing more heat than a maiden’s whittling blade.

“Why so? Don’t you think they have their hands full?” Eden asked, snidely, to cover her straining to reach the knife. Javier’s back was still turned.

“Allison Nightstar’s one of the best trackers New Scandinavia’s produced,” Javier was drawling. “Born to it, you know. Raised by outlaws. But surely you know about that.”

“Better than most,” Eden shot back, thinking back to Allison’s role in taking down the Dark Corps mining monstrosity just a year ago. “But I also know that she wouldn’t choose going after me or you over saving civilian lives.”

“Oh, really?” Javier turned, and Eden was able to arrange her arms and features into docility just in time to escape his notice. He turned back to the outside, and she commenced to wrangle for her knife.

“I don’t know whose side you’re on, but Allison and Alonso are always on the side of what’s right,” Eden muttered. “And you’re trying to blackmail them, so…”

“What makes you think I’m not on the right side too?” Javier said, stifling a yawn.

“You’ve kidnapped me? Threatened my fiance’s life?”

Javier flashed her a dark look that was brief enough to miss the desperate set of her shoulders. “Like with Allison, I was born to it. My family, or what was left of us by the time that I came along, had been rebelling for so long it was all we could do to survive. I had to learn to operate outside of the law, do what was right, even if it was illegal…”

 _Good. Good. Monologue, fucker._ Eden seized her knife, managed to flick it open with a thumb, and silently sliced through the rope binding her wrists. Now if she only had a horse, she’d be on more than equal footing with this shady revolutionary.

 

 

Allison wasn’t even worried as she approached the fire and fighting. She was too focussed on the now: men behind a barricade to her left, a shootout happening off by that stand of scrub oak. No more dynamite shacks, as far as she could reckon, but she noticed people fleeing out to the hill country, getting caught up by the uniformed railroad guards as they struggled up the steep sides of Lonesome Valley.

What could she even do to get everyone’s attention? Nobody even batted an eye at a woman striding into their midst. Had there been any soiled doves making camp beside this latest Hell on Wheels, they’d long since fled, probably warned of strike action in advance by their beaux. Allison didn’t blame them. She fired an experimental shot into the air, but nobody noticed.

 _Well now what?_ The foremen and Line representatives could be anywhere, and the act of looking was a death wish. How could-

Allison lunged sideways on instinct to avoid the approach of galloping hooves from behind her. The clouds of dust and smoke parted briefly to reveal- Ali?

“I found Alonso. He’s taking the horses to find Eden,” Ali said breathlessly.

A spectrum of emotions passed over the Marshal’s face. He was safe- but for how long? Had she missed her chance to save him and do what she came here to do? “Where’s Eden?” she asked, calmly.

“We don’t know, but there’s a man here that’s after Alonso. Knows him from the Rangers, bears a grudge, made some threats, looks kinda like Rolf but-”

“Javier,” growled Allison, an involuntary shiver rolling down her spine. Leave it to her evil ex-boyfriend to throw his hat in the ring.

Ali nodded emphatically. “Yes! That was him! And since neither of us have seen Eden for a while, and she hasn’t seen Alonso… anyway, he gave me his badge and told me to help you.”

Allison looked Ali up and down. After a few days on the trail, she looked wholly the part of a brawl-busting gunslinger, albeit a finely dressed one under the filth. Allison tossed her one of the rifles.

“Help me find whoever’s losing this fight, and get them out of here,” she instructed. “This is a dispute to be settled in a court of order, not in a firefight in a dead-end valley. And Ali?”

“Yes?”

“Use your badge to your advantage. Stay close.”

 

At a dead run, Alonso swung the string of horses wide, trying to find some cover for them near the end of the line. He had to get the herd stashed somewhere safe while he sought Eden and went back for Allison- he would go back. A shrill whistle drew his attention, and he reined Mardy in just in time to avoid trampling a black-haired man in chaps who’d alighted from a tree, exuding an air of nonchalance.

Alonso looked back at the roiling pandemonium of camp. He turned back towards the black-haired man, who had folded his arms and, though he wasn’t, might as well have been whistling.

“What’re you doing with my horse?” Rolf demanded.

Alonso looked back (again) and immediately picked the skewbald mare out of the lineup of familiar long, horsey faces. “So you’re Ali’s friend?” He asked, weakly, trying to match the mood.

Rolf’s knitted brows relaxed. “So you saw her. I just parted ways with the Marshal-”

Alonso nodded along. “I saw her walking towards the fighting. How’d she convince you to let her go?”

Rolf gracefully swung onto Winddancer’s back and pulled aside his jacket to reveal the maps and documents- practically a personal library. “Someone had to save the evidence. I’m also your guide across to Goldenhill, if we ever get that far.”

“Great, then-”

Alonso was cut off by a howl of pain, emanating from inside the mountain.

The fighting, it seemed, had spread to the earth itself.


	8. Dynamite and Cattle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Punch! Bam! Ratatatatat! TW for guns in which Eden is scrappy sassmuffin, Ali gets real dirty, and Allison goes all sacrificial (again)

Inside the mountain, it was not the earth the was yelling but Javier, clutching at his right hand.

Eden spun away, knife brandished and bloody, panting. Who knew that the little blade, really not much more than a keepsake from Old Jorvik, would win her her freedom?

 _Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re still face to face with your fiance’s nemesis, and you’ve made him angry._ Eden felt like every nerve in her body was firing at once; she was crouched and ready, fully alive. _More alive than I’ve felt in a year._

Javier was still between Eden and entrance, but his guard had slipped. She lunged for the entrance; he slammed into her, sending her skidding across slickrock, peeling some skin from her cheek. She was up in an instant. Javier threw himself towards her with a mighty yell. His next swing would have laid her flat had not someone else’s fist caught him in the act.

Eden looked up from flinching away from an impact that never came. She could hardly tell what was what, between the pain in her cheek, the ringing in her ears, the dark and the scuffling, filthy backs of working men, but she did pick out Alonso’s voice and her heart leapt in her throat.  

 

 

Ali and Allison pelted for the cover of pushcar filled with dirt, horses in tow. After a beat, they peeked over the piled debris at the carnage awaiting them. That was when, by the grace of Aideen, Allison spotted a flash of red hair peeking out from behind a stack of barrels. A pair of eyes followed and, for an instant, locked with hers. When no gunshots followed the peek, she had a sneaking suspicion that one of her targets might be hiding there. She silently motioned to Ali and together they crept towards the stack.

 “New Jorvik Rangers,” Allison announced, sweeping aside her duster to reveal her badge.

 The man who peered out at them had sweeping mustaches and a suit far too fine be a labourer. “The name’s Anderson,” he said hoarsely. “Foreman and chief builder for the New Jaralaheim Line. How might I be of service to you la- ah, _Rangers_ this morning?”

_It was still morning? Fuck._

 Allison cut right to the chase. “Are you working on behalf of the Pinkerton detective agency?” she asked.

 Ali cut in with a conciliatory smile. “We don't mean to accuse you, sir, but we're here to clear up an instance of labor spying.” She felt disingenuous showing him Alonso's badge as if it were her own, but in this situation any means were justified. _Weren’t they?_

 “No, not me, but the men have been rumbling saying there is a spy among us. Me, I just work for the Line.”

 “Did you see where the other bosses went?” Allison asked briskly.

“They're holed up in that boxcar yonder,” Anderson said, gesturing to a car derailed off to one side of the camp. It was iron-clad, the only truly defensible position for miles, at least as far as flammability went. That, and the hole in the mountainside.

 A tingle ran down Ali’s spine. If there were only two defensible positions in Lonesome Valley, and Eden was lost somewhere, odds were she was being held in the mountainside. She shoved that thought aside and pointed in the direction that Alonso had taken the horses.

“We’ll see if we can't deescalate the situation at the boxcar,” she said coolly. “You head for the mountainside. Deputy Alonso Arraya Torres has a string of horses hidden over there; we can get you out alive if you stick close to him.”

 Anderson nodded. “I knew there was something funny about that boy. Seems far too polished for a navvy.”

 Allison cut in one more time. “Do you know of any dynamite that hasn't been blown yet?” she asked solemnly. Anderson hesitated.

“A matter of life and death, sir.”

Anderson let out a defeated sigh. “My backup cache is directly under that railcar. Not sure if anyone else knows.”

 “How big?” Allison asked.

 Anderson raised his eyebrows. “Big enough,” he said

 “Right. Good luck.” Allison and Ali turned and ran towards the railcar, and Anderson pelted for the shadows of the hillside.

 

 

Their progress was slowed by a hail of bullets. Allison dropped into a crouch and scrutinized that railcar. One stray bullet, in theory, could blow it sky high, all unknowing.

 _Why is it always me that has to deal in explosions?_ She thought back to the Dark Corps drill she’d had to demolish during the battle for New Jorvik. Her plan was still nascent, but she knew instinctively that the cache was the key to getting out of here alive.

 

Ali, meanwhile, identified the key players as if she were scoping out guests at a cotillion. Only instead of assessing net worths, she was taking stock of personal armament. _My, how times do change._

The fortified car, clearly once a home to explosives or money, showed a few gun barrels protruding from the small, high windows. She counted five; the mob hurling shouts and projectiles at said windows was fifty strong. She noted that at least half were somewhat drunk, having presumably breached the Line’s liquor cabinets. The other half, mercifully, seemed to be running out of bullets. _This hardly counts as a strike,_ she thought to herself. _It’s more of an all-out riot. Surely they planned it better than this? Else why would the Line have brought in an expensive private detective agency?_

“So I’m the bad cop?” Allison was looking at her expectantly, watching the cogs beneath her crumpled hat turn.

Ali snapped back to reality. “More like the arbitrator. You stop the bullets and call off the mob, get me inside the car, I’ll see how much clout I can muster.”

Allison sighed. First dynamite, and now she had the sneaking suspicion that she was about to risk her neck for what? The stump of a railroad, dead-ended in the wilderness?

 

 

 

 

“Did you fucking plan this?” Alonso hissed as he knelt on Javier’s back. Rolf was binding his wrists; Eden, handily using the line that had recently been holding her, had scrambled to her feet and was tying his ankles.

“Mmmmph!” Javier’s face was pressed to the granite floor. Alonso made to pick his head up using his sleek black hair, but Rolf, more detached from the situation, considerately turned his head gently. Javier spat out a mouthful of rubble.

“Why should I tell you?” He said, coolly. “We both know you’re spying for the Pinks. I can’t think of anything less than Pinkerton cash that would motivate you to hide your badge and do something less than honorable.”

“I’ll have you know that I’ve been a double agent for the last two weeks at least,” Alonso countered wearily. He looked up, and the dawning sense of his own freedom- finally- shone bright as he met Eden’s eyes. She barely managed to avoid tackling him in an embrace, and buried the unscathed half of her face in his shoulder.

“Do you mind?” Javier asked.

Eden and Alonso eased off his back, and Javier started breathing again. “You mean to tell me,” he wheezed between lungfulls of air, “that you’re not the Pinkerton man who sent the dispatch last Friday?”

“I swear to you, I wasn’t,” Alonso replied seriously. “I sided with the strikers long ago. How could I not?”

“I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t dropped off the face of the earth weeks ago,” Eden snapped, looking up from the comfort of Alonso’s arms.

“Then tell me who it is,” Javier said, hungrily. “Surely you have an idea.”

Alonso looked away. His hunch was loose at best, cobbled together from feelings rather than evidence. As far as Ranger procedure went, it wouldn’t warrant a second look.

_But what do I have to lose?_

“Anderson, the foreman,” he muttered. “Who might, for all we know, be dead by now. C’mon Eden, Rolf; we’ve got better company to keep than the likes of him.”

Javier rolled onto his back to watch the trio depart, into the light. “What you got planned for me, _Chileno?_ ” we said through a cyanide smile.

Alonso stopped and momentarily turned back. “The Marshal, I’m sure, will want to renew your acquaintance.”

 

 

 

It would, of course, take something breathtakingly brash to cause a temporary ceasefire. So Allison was brash.

 

The safe side of the railcar was slightly warmed by the sun, and its iron bands made passable footholds as she scaled its monstrous bulk. She knew that once she cleared the top, she’d be completely exposed; no turning back now.

 

Allison cast one last glance down to Ali, who waited below, trying not to think about her proximity to a _big enough_ cache of dynamite. Ali flashed a winning-friends-and-influencing-people smile her way, and Allison vaulted up onto the roof, badge in hand. Her golden bandana caught the breeze; maybe that’s what stopped their fingers at the triggers.

 

“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” she roared, with the authority of a Valkyrie. She held her badge aloft, a peace offering, and her gun by the middle in the other hand, unusable.

 

She was shocked that she was still standing; the shock grew with each passing second.

The crowd was, somehow, listening.

_Praise Aideen._

“Dead men can’t meet your demands,” she announced. She felt like she was speaking into the void. “If you allow my associate and I to negotiate for you- if you let these men live, to be tried before the law- you can keep your livelihood. If not, you’ll be little better than outlaws.”

The crowd erupted in murmurs. “Give us the boss, Ranger,” hooted a slurring voice. "Is that a threat, girl?" boomed another.

Ali, below, noticed that the muzzles had been withdrawn from the windows of the railcar.

The sound of a cocking hammer caused Allison to drop her gun. It clattered to the roof of the car, and her heart dropped down to her feet with it. She was defenseless. “You’re owed a month’s pay,” she roared over the growing tumult, growing hoarse. “I have a shareholder here who’ll guarantee payments directly if you’ll just stand. _Down.”_

 _Big enough_. What did that even mean? As the drunken crowd grew untenable, as a shot was fired over her head, Allison was growing desperate. That was when she noticed movement, from the corner of her eye; Ali, smeared in grime, leading a straggling parade of filth-caked men, out from under the railcar. _How in heaven…?_

Ali threw her a salute as the last man crawled out, and then they were gone into the smoke, walking and then running.

Another shot whizzed past Allison’s ear. The grumbling had turned to shouts. “Get outta here, Pink!” shouted someone from below. _So they, too, knew about the spy._

Allison’s heel scraped thin air; she’d run out of roof. It was now or never.

“FINE!” She boomed, with the last breath left in her lungs. “The last of the dynamite’s under this car. Go ahead! Take your shot! See if you ever see anything in return for your wildcat strike!”  And betting on an eventuality, Allison threw herself backwards off the railcar.


	9. Gold in Them Thar Hills

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hooray, hooray, the gang's all here!

The explosion could be felt from a mile away, and halted Eden, Alonso, and Rolf in their tracks.

“I hope we’re not too late,” breathed Eden, laying a calming hand on Phoenix’s tossing neck. She could feel his pulse racing, just like her own.

Rolf had paled a shade, and his jaw was set hard. “If those fools took Ali…”

Alonso’s stomach knotted. All this- at least Allison, Eden, and Ali being here, in danger- was his doing. But he didn’t have time to dwell- there was still time to make things right.

All three drew their weapons at the sound of running footsteps coming from the dense fug of smoke before them (although Eden’s only fortification was still her wee knife). They fell at ease when a lone runner, huffing and puffing through his mustaches, emerged alone.

“Andersen?” Alonso asked, too tired to show surprise.

“The others will be following, I expect,” the man wheezed. “Your Ranger friends were freeing them, last I saw.”

“And that?” Rolf demanded, gesturing to the rising cloud of debris in the distance.

Anderson looked behind him and was shaking his head, hopeless, as Ali appeared, followed by a line of dragging men in suits.

Rolf leaped to the ground and ran to meet her, but pulled himself up just short of an embrace. “Al- Miss Archdotter,” he said, almost a sigh.

Ali had no such qualms. Filth and all, high-powered bystanders and all, she threw herself into Rolf’s arms, and in his embrace finally let her shoulders relax. Her one friend in this wilderness was here, in the circle of her arms, and looking over his shoulder, she could see two more friends. As unfortunate as the circumstances were, she couldn’t help a small smile.

“Allison threw herself free,” she announced, cutting through to their most pressing concern. “These gentlemen are the representatives of the Line- until recently besieged in a boxcar.”

“How did you get to them?” Andersen asked, thunderstruck. “That car was designed to keep everything- and everyone- out, come hell or high-”

“There’s always a trapdoor,” Ali grinned, still holding Rolf. She took a step back to gesture to herself. “You just need to _slither_ to reach it. Thankfully the attackers were otherwise occupied. Now if you gentlemen don’t mind, I spotted a band of horses off by the spring, down the trail a ways. If you can catch them, we’ll reconvene in New Jarlaheim in a few weeks’ time, hmm?”

The gentlemen were somewhat aghast; here was a well-bred lady who’d come bursting through the floor of their stronghold, feet first, and all but bodily shoved them through the underpinnings of an oily, dirt-caked railcar in a bid for their lives. She hadn’t once lost her cool; even when they heard the other woman shouting behind them, about blowing the car, sky high, she’d simply asked them, please, to run, and here they were, delivered from certain grisly ruin. And now she was asking them to catch their own horses?

“Do I look like a stableboy?” Ali asked, letting an edge of impatience creep into her voice for the first time, and folding her arms. “Best get moving; when your pursuers- if there are many left- recover from the blast and regain their senses, you’ll not want to be nearby.”

Rolf offered her a hand from Winddancer’s saddle, and Ali swung up behind him. Even now she could see Calypso and Cochise cantering down the track, eyes rolling white, stirrups flopping.

“Let’s find the Marshal and get the hell outta Lonesome Valley,” she said calmly, and the three horses moved off, leaving the blueblooded railroad investors to make their own way home.

 

 

_I can’t fucking believe. This._

Allison had to be alive; how else was she thinking? _I think, therefore I am. I am…_ she tried to open her eyes. The sky spun in double time. She squeezed them shut and tried to figure out if it really was the sky she was looking at.

“Well, well, well.”

The voice conjured up memories long submerged in Allison’s busy mind, but convinced her that she was, in fact, dead, her life flashing before her eyes and ears. She’d almost slipped back into that reverie, letting the past pull her under like a wave, when a pulse of adrenaline shot through her veins, snapping her upright.

Javier!

He was _here._ Ali had seen Alonso, and Alonso had said… Allison was on her knees, panting, patting the ground blindly for a weapon. Why, oh why, could she only see as if through a fog?

“Not sure you expected to see me again, this side of the grave,” Javier was drawling from somewhere very close behind her left ear.  Allison’s spine stiffened.

“You’re- you’re not really here,” she rasped, one last denial. She felt as if her throat was caked with dust.

“On the contrary-” movement, he’d stood up and was pacing behind her- “I’m very much here, having survived an encounter with the rest of your little ragamuffin posse. They were merciful. Even believed I wasn’t working for the Pinkertons,” he drawled. “Alonso always was a soft touch, wasn’t he? Never knew when a bullet-” Allison could practically feel him shooting off a fingergun- “would solve his problems. Naw, sweet Alonso just left me for the vultures.”

“Friction trick? Or a hidden blade?” she muttered. Back at the Ranger academy, they’d spent… _interesting_ hours practicing escapes from various bindings. Javier dreaded captivity, having seen too many friends and family thrown into jail. Allison, thinking back to her life on the run, had been able to relate.

“Friction,” he breathed, suddenly right beside her again, breath hot on her neck.

Allison, at this point, had had it. First the downtrodden workers she’d set out to protect had tried to shoot her. Then she had to bite the dynamite bullet on behalf of the Line bosses. Now, her ex had materialized and was taunting her and she couldn’t _fucking_ see. Allison liked to think that keeping her cool was a skill she’d honed to a fine point over the course of her time as a Ranger and an outlaw, but now…

A shooting pain in her hand caught her attention. _My badge._ She was still gripping the bronze-cut star, and it was digging into her palm with a great ferocity. Instinct took over and she grabbed; swung; felt the pointed badge connect with the solid wall of muscle and cheekbones that was Javier. He crumpled with a groan- she must have hit a pre-existing injury- and Allison was up and stumbling, away from retribution. The fog was lifting, slowly, and she could make out clear, dazzling sunlight ahead.

“Run, Marshal,” she heard him say weakly. But there was no looking back.

 

 

 

When Allison heard galloping hooves thundering towards her, she stood her ground, ready to surrender herself to the mob or worse. But when she spotted Cochise’s familiar muzzle bobbing towards her, she sagged in relief and would have fallen had not Eden and Ali leapt from their saddles to support her.

“We thought you were a goner,” Eden grinned.

“Can you survive a trip through the mountains to Goldenhill, Allison?” Ali was cutting in, concerned.

Allison looked up and caught Alonso’s eye. He touched the brim of his hat in salute. “Ma’am.”

She smiled twofold- she could see!- and nodded in return. “At ease, Deputy. And… Deputy.” Ali was saluting with the arm that wasn’t holding Allison up. “I just shanked that turncoat ex of mine. Who, by the way, was your Pinkerton contact all along. He’ll be on his feet presently, so let’s ride.”

“We’re all here for you, if you want to go after him,” Rolf said diplomatically. “The papers are secure, the horses are all here, and I’ll have us in Goldenhill by this time tomorrow. He’s our one loose end.”

Allison squeezed Eden and Ali’s hands and shakily stepped her stirrup. “I got what I came for,” she said with a wry smile. “And some more besides. If I remember a thing about Javier, I know that he’ll turn up again- and when that time comes, I’ll be waiting for him.”

 

Eden and Alonso exchanged a look. It was not the time to ask what she’d do when he arrived.

 

 

 

 

Eden had rarely felt so grand. After following Rolf through a twilit fantasyland of steep, rugged, uncharted rocky wilderness- well it _was_ charted, roughly, but they possessed the only known copy of a map, so- with Alonso by her side, they’d emerged onto the vast plateau that was home to Goldenhill. The early Jorvegian settlers had called it after a valley back on the old island, and Eden had always thought it strange, sitting at her grandmother’s knee and hearing tales of the pioneers, that her forebearers had named a plateau for a valley- weren’t they opposites? But as the five riders rose up over the last slope and broke into a whooping canter across the blissfully level ground, she could see the reasoning: dense groves of aspens stretched as far as the eye could see, and their yellow-green leaves stained the earth and ground below a brilliant, warm gold. It was breathtaking.

Eden looked over at Alonso, whose smile was equally breathtaking as he sweettalked in Mardy’s ear, leaning out over her neck, riding like a centaur. If she reached out her hand she could touch him, feel his warmth and know that he was safe with her once more. She felt a lump form in her throat. The earth was radiant today and the heavy weight of failure and disappointment seemed lighter. Manageable. She could bear it.

 

 

Rolf signalled for the group to stop at a crystal-clear spring, and they all dismounted to let their tired horses drink and rest.

“It’s another three hours to Goldenhill, at least, in daylight,” he announced. “The sun’s getting low and our horses are far from fresh. Shall we stop the night here?”

Ali piped up with a “Yes!” almost before he was done. The bar of soap in her saddlebag was calling her name, practically shouting it by now. And then… once they reached Goldenhill, there was no promise that Rolf would stay.

Eden and Alonso exchanged another look. Allison, who missed nothing, rolled her eyes as if to say “Get a room” and nodded curtly. Honestly it was taking more strength than she thought she had to remain upright in her saddle. Every bone in her body felt brittle, every joint rusty, and her head was still foggy.

“Don’t fret about pitching y’alls’ tents too close to mine,” she groused around a sneaking smile. “Right now, I could sleep through _anything._ ” She swung Cochise’s saddle free and stalked off to find a comfy piece of ground.

“You don’t need to tell me twice!” Eden grinned at her retreating back. She reached for Phoenix’s saddle, but found that Alonso had already shouldered it and met her gaze with a saucy wink. They zoomed off into the aspens with the speed of a freight train.

 

Ali subconsciously smoothed her (oil-streaked, dirt-caked) hair and turned to face Rolf. They were truly alone, for the first time in months. He looked up from running a hand down Winddancer’s hocks, checking for heat or swelling from their gruelling climb. By Aideen’s light, of all the slick-haired, shoe-shined, spit-polished dandies that had paid suit to her back on the island, not a one had made her heart leap like Rolf did. And no parlour or ballroom could compare with the gold-suffused evening light of this new world.  

“Well,” she said.

Rolf set his horse’s hoof down. “Well,” he replied.

Ali remembered the soap in her hand. “Could you give me just a minute?”

Rolf suppressed a blush and ducked his head. “Oh! Yes, of course. But…” he looked up at her from beneath his ridiculously thick lashes, and Ali thought she might swoon- “If you yell when you’re clean and decent again, I’ll brush your hair for you…” he quirked a smile and pulled a gorgeous bone comb from his breast pocket and gestured to his ponytail. “Long hair, right?”

Ali had to bite down on her lip to keep back a gleeful gasp. “I’d be delighted,” she managed. Since when had she lost her tongue? She could keep a calm demeanour before captains of industry and certain death but _him?_ This gorgeous light of her life? Not a chance.

“I’ve got a tent with me, it’s big enough for-”

“Yesthat’sfine!”

Rolf returned her smile. “Okay. Just- tell me when you’re ready.”


	10. Epilogue/Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The posse makes plans to go home, wherever that is. There's just one loose end still hanging out there...

_Forty-eight hours later..._

 

Ice pealed like bells as Alonso lifted the glass of brandy to his lips. Ice- even without a railroad connection for leagues, even with winter a distant memory- was available in Goldenhill, for a steep price. Thankfully, Ali knew which strings to pull to get them rooms in the only decent hotel and good service at the bar downstairs.

 

Eden traced the calluses on his palm- new since they’d kissed goodbye in New Jorvik months ago, but now she knew them as if they were her own- with her thumb. While she’d been tempted to give the barmaid who served them a few pointers, she was still basking in the golden glow of success and love’s labour won. She felt like they could just keep riding from here, any direction, and things would be fine. Better than fine.

 

“Eden!” Ali and Rolf sailed into the bar, arm in arm, having come from the telegraph office. It was so new you could still smell the paint on the walls, and Ali had kept the telegrapher busier than he’d ever been before, tapping off missives left, right, and center to the Archdotter Enterprises office in New Jorvik, to the New Jarlaheim Line headquarters, and even across the ocean to Old Jorvik- although those telegrams she judiciously signed “Al. Archdotter.”

 

“I picked this up for you two,” Ali said with a wink, laying a newspaper on the table in front of Eden and Alonso. The headline, a few months old and well-travelled, read: CHILEAN FORCES OCCUPY LIMA.

“Not that anyone wants you to leave, but I heard you two were looking for a fresh start,” Ali said softly. “Somewhere you won’t need dirty Pinkerton money to go.”

Eden squeezed Alonso’s arm. “If the war could be over soon… if we could even just _visit_ your family and the ranch…”

It was Alonso’s turn to hold back a lump in his throat. “Perhaps,” he said.

 

It was then that Allison strode back into the bar, limping around a swollen ankle sustained in the explosion but otherwise her brisk, badge-clad self. She’d slept hard at the campsite in the aspens, and again for twenty-four hours straight once they reached Goldenhill and a bed. Now she was back on her feet and rallying local law enforcement- and concerned citizens- to form search parties to look for the wandering railroad men, both bosses and workers. She’d just come from a checkup with the local doctor who, though she declared him to be not a patch on Dr. Peterson, patched her up enough to fit a finger on her trigger despite a bandaged hand.

 

“Have any of them been found yet?” Alonso asked, mildly concerned for Andersen and unduly concerned about Javier.

“None of my search parties have returned, but they’re under strict orders to fire no guns, shed no tears,” Allison stated, sinking gratefully into a chair. She tapped twice on the bar for a Scotch on the rocks, and held the cool glass to her forehead when it arrived. “I can’t imagine they’ll find Javier, but if they do…” her mind wandered back to the deep slumber of the past days and how he’d appeared here and there in her dreams, sometimes laughing and full of charm, sometimes staring at her from the other end of the barrel of a gun. She shook her head to clear it; the past was the past, and Javier would always be out there when she needed prey. Right now there were men to save, negotiations to supervise, and, eventually, home to which to return. As for the leadership back at Ranger HQ, they could go sit on a cactus for all she cared. _Maybe it takes staring death in the eyes and living to tell the tale for me to remember just how much power I have,_ she reflected. _When I get back to headquarters, the Commandants won't know what hit them._

She noticed Eden, Alonso, Ali, and Rolf watching her, patiently waiting for a response. _Oh right. Javier._

“If they do, they know who to tell.”

 

 

Rolf excused himself to go check on the horses in the livery, and Ali went with him. Her new dress still smelled of starch, but she was missing her breeches and duster fiercely. She couldn’t wait to get back on the trail home. But first:

“So was this all the business you had to conclude, with New Jarlaheim?” she asked him, as he scratched Winddancer’s poll.

Rolf flashed a smile that Ali could only classify as promising. She touched the knot of hair, gleaming like cornsilk, at the nape of her neck. He pushed a stray curl behind her ear. “The Line’s wiring my pay as soon as they receive their copies of the records we saved,” he said. “Then I’m a free man once more.”

“Then hearken to my proposal,” she announced, putting on an extra plummy old world accent. She knew how it made him chuckle.

“As long as, whatever it is, I can get a dog,” he said seriously.

Ali bubbled with laughter. “Well that’s a given. I was thinking…with the New Jarlaheim Line tied up in arbitration for the next, oh, forever, perhaps Archdotter Enterprises might look into expanding their reach to railroad construction. Connect Goldenhill and the other backwater towns to the rest of the country. Really leave our mark on the new world- but we’ll need a scout to help me chart a new course, naturally. A right hand man.”

Rolf made an overly contemplative face, but his mind was already made up. “Just the right hand?” Ali snorted in laughter. “I suppose I’ll head over New Jorvik way, see about putting down a root or two,” he replied softly, changing his tone. “Plenty of country needs scouting, but I’ll want a home to return to.”

Ali turned back towards the horses, resting her chin in her palm. “I’m ready to call it home, Rolf,” she sighed. “But I’m not planning on growing complacent. So you’ll help me escape, whenever business becomes too mundane?”

He took her free hand and lightly brushed his lips across her knuckles. “It would be my pleasure,” he said.

 

 

 

 

The smoke had settled in Lonesome Valley. The coyotes and ravens had done their scrounging; the one man left, alive at least, for those that could had all walked off by now, looking for their next adventure, let the clean air fill his lungs.

His wounds were on their way to healing, and he’d found a horse and a saddle among the ruination. He was ready to move on. But to where?

He thought, momentarily, about riding for a city and wiring the Pinkertons, demanding his pay. But was it worth all that? He’d only been in it for the feel of silver in his pockets, anyway. Screw it.

There was only one place that made him feel at home and, whether she liked it or not, he would find her trail eventually. Maybe drop a clue or two in the next podunk town he ran across. And wait. 


End file.
